Solipsism, as much as skillfulness, is what the contributors to this year's collection seem to have most in common. ``A good essay for me is an essay that pleases me,'' guest editor Kincaid (Lucy, 1990, etc.) declares in her introduction, setting the pace for the overweening, self-indulgent egos that parade through the rest of the volume, coedited by series editor Atwan. The title of William H. Gass's otherwise murky essay clearly states their overarching theme: ``The Art of Self.'' The problem is not this time-honored topic, of course. Rather, it is the excessive narcissism that many of these authors exhibit, whether explicitly discussing themselves or just drifting from some other subject into navel-gazing. We expect nothing else from Harold Brodkey, whose first dispatch from his struggle with AIDS appears here. Maxine Kumin disappoints, however, with a celebration of vegetable gardening that fairly oozes self-satisfaction. Most egregious is Edward Hoagland's apologia for his adulteries, which masquerades as an elegy for his late wife. Some of the autobiographical pieces do manage to avoid blithe egocentrism. Tobias Wolff and Henry Louis Gates Jr., elaborating their already well-known midlife memoirs, keep the focus on their families and friends. Grace Paley sketches the women whom she met when she spent a week in a Greenwich Village jail for protesting the Vietnam war. Fine efforts come from Joseph Brodsky and Elaine Scarry: Brodsky's record of his ongoing fascination with the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius shows him confronting, rather than simply emulating, a prototypical imperial self, while Scarry argues persuasively that the ends of centuries bring a heightening of poetic consciousness. On the evidence of this inconsistent tenth volume, however, such vaunted fin-de-siäcle magic seems to be failing for essays.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-69184-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
An authoritative study of the emergence of Jewish studies on the American campus. Sociologists have noted that access to and achievement in higher education facilitated the entrance of American Jews into the economic and cultural mainstream. Ritterband (Jewish Studies and Sociology/City College, CUNY) and Wechsler (Education and Human Development/Univ. of Rochester) remind us that, as a widespread phenomenon, this is recent; until the 1950s and early 1960s some Ivy League schools had quotas for Jewish students and faculty. But at the turn of the century, in a small but pivotal group of American universities, there were quite a few Jewish students, and a smaller proportion of faculty members who were offering courses on Jewish subjects, often under the rubric of Semitic Studies. The authors focus on six of these schools—Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of California, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1875 and 1925 these schools offered courses in ancient Near Eastern languages, biblical archaeology, and comparative philology. As the authors note, ``The American Semitics professorate contained a goodly proportion of Jews who commanded sufficient resources to assume the subject's inclusion.'' By the mid-1920s academic anti-Semitism and a shift in the priorities of American Jews precipitated a sharp decline in both Jewish student enrollments and course offerings in Judaica. All of higher education was in the throes of change, and subjects as esoteric as biblical criticism and comparative philology were seen as irrelevant. The book, which ends with the proliferation of Jewish Studies programs in the 1970s, has wider implications than its title would indicate: regarding the value of a liberal education, the contents of the much-disputed literary canon, and the structuring of the college curriculum, which, the authors note, ``is rarely invented from a coherent rational plan.'' This analysis of an important American educational story is somewhat plodding and dry, but the end result is coherent and insightful.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-253-35039-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
An elegantly idiosyncratic, leisurely and—at its most successful—revealing stroll through London's highways and byways that transcends the coffee-table genre. A long-time art critic for the the New York Times, British- born Russell is an erudite guide to the city he made his home for over 50 years (if one at times rather too fond of the sound of his own voice). He takes the reader on a wholly personal, unsystematic, yet surprisingly thorough ramble through London's long history and its labyrinthine social topographies as well as its protean physical aspect. Though he occasionally lapses into travelogue bromides (``there is no better school of life than the streets of a great city''), more often Russell succeeds in finding neglected perspectives that help us reimagine a city made overfamiliar by mass tourism and media: a history of London's 19th-century salon culture, an explanation of what goes on behind the closed doors of the city through a history of its architecture, and, throughout, a refreshing emphasis on London as the living and working home of millions of ordinary folk rather than a picturesque museum. Having come to know the city in its imperial twilight, Russell does sometimes fall prey to nostalgic Edwardianisms (for instance, in his rose-tinted and pompous descriptions of Parliament); but at his best he combines the historian's long view, the aesthete's appreciative gaze, and the social critic's inquiring eye to paint a bracingly complex picture of a city whose heritage continues to evolve—such as his account of the Docklands transformation from commercial and imperial hub to the sometimes combustible social laboratory of the new London. At its unstuffy best, Russell's ``tour'' is brought to vivid life by his unfailingly apposite selection of paintings, engravings, architects' drawings and photographs, in general excellently reproduced (though on occasion large-scale images have been reduced beyond comfortable scrutiny). Russell for the most part offers the armchair traveler and the inquiring mind alike five-star service. (183 illustrations, 86 in color) (Book-of-the-Month Club dividend selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8109-3570-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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